2.

2 MARXISM
Marxism is a difficult and contentious body of work. But it is also more than this: it is a body of
revolutionary theory with the purpose of changing the world. Marxism insists that all are ultimately
political. The Marxist approach to culture insists that texts and practices must be analyzed in
relation to their historical conditions of production (and in some versions, the changing conditions
of their consumption and reception). What makes the Marxist methodology different from other
‘historical’ approaches to culture is the Marxist conception of history. Marx argues that each
significant period in history is constructed around a particular ‘mode of production’: that is, the
way in which a society is organized As Marx (1976b) famously said: ‘The philosophers have only
interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’ 10 (i.e. slave, feudal, capitalist) to
produce the material necessaries of life – food, shelter, etc. specific ways of obtaining the
necessaries of life. As Marx (1976a) explains, ‘The mode of production of material life conditions
the social, political and intellectual life process in general’. Products of Modes of Production: (i)
specific ways of obtaining the necessaries of life (ii) specific social relationships between workers
and those who control the mode of production, and (iii) specific social institutions (including
cultural ones). At the heart of this analysis is the claim that how a society produces its means of
existence (its particular ‘mode of production’) ultimately determines the political, social and
cultural shape of that society and its possible future development. A classical Marxist approach to
popular culture would above all else insist that to understand and explain a text or practice it must
always be situated in its historical moment of production, analyzed in terms of the historical
conditions that produced it. There are dangers here: historical conditions are reduced to the mode
of production and the superstructure becomes a passive reflection of the base. For example, a
full analysis of nineteenth-century stage melodrama (one of the first culture industries) would have
to weave together into focus both the changes in the mode of production that made stage
melodrama’s audience a possibility and the theatrical traditions that generated its form. The same
also holds true for a full analysis of music hall (another early culture industry). Although in neither
instance should performance be reduced to changes in the material forces of production, what
would be insisted on is that a full analysis of stage melodrama or music hall would not be possible
without reference to the changes in theatre attendance brought about by changes in the mode of
production. Theodor Adorno (1991) and Max Horkheimer (1978) coined the term ‘culture industry’
to designate the products and processes of mass culture. The products of the culture industry,
they claim, are marked by two features: homogeneity, ‘film, radio and magazines make up a
system which is uniform as a whole and in every part . . . all mass culture is identical’, and
predictability. While Malcolm Arnold (2009) and F.R Leavis (2009) had worried that popular culture
represented a threat to cultural and social authority, the Frankfurt School argue that it produces
the opposite effect: it maintains social authority. Leo Lowenthal (1961) contends that the culture
industry, by producing a culture marked by ‘standardization, stereotype, conservatism, mendacity,
manipulated consumer goods’, has worked to depoliticize the working class – limiting its horizon
to political and economic goals that could be realized within the oppressive and exploitative
framework of capitalist society.
Authentic culture has taken over the utopian function of religion: to keep alive the human desire
for a better world beyond the confines of the present. (Horkheimer 1978) The culture industry, in
its search for profits and cultural homogeneity, deprives ‘authentic’ culture of its critical function,
its mode of negation. Commodification (sometimes understood by other critics as
‘commercialization’) devalues ‘authentic’ culture, making it too accessible by turning it into yet
another saleable commodity. It carries the key to unlock the prison-house established by the
development of mass culture by the capitalist culture industry. But increasingly the processes of
the culture industry threaten the radical potential of ‘authentic’ culture.
2.3. STRUCTURALISM
Structuralism is a way of approaching texts and practices that is derived from the theoretical work
of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Based on this claim, he suggests that meaning is
not the result of an essential correspondence between signifiers and signified; it is rather the result
of difference and relationship. In other words, Saussure’s is a relational theory of language.
Meaning is produced not through a one-to-one relation to things in the world, but by establishing
difference. Structuralists argue that language organizes and constructs our sense of reality –
different languages in effect produce different mappings of the real.
Two Divisions of Language
1. Langue refers to the system of language, the rules and conventions that organize it. This is
language as a social institution, and as Roland Barthes (1967) points out, ‘it is essentially a
collective contract which one must accept in its entirety if one wishes to communicate’.
2. Parole refers to the individual utterance, the individual use of language. To clarify this point,
Saussure compares language to the game of chess. Here we can distinguish between the rules
of the game and an actual game of chess. Without the body of rules there could be no actual
game, but it is only in an actual game that these rules are made manifest. Therefore, there is
language and parole, structure, and performance. It is the homogeneity of the structure that
makes the heterogeneity of the performance possible.
Two theoretical approaches to linguistics (Saussure): 1. diachronic approach, which studies the
historical development of a given language, and 2. synchronic approach, which studies a given
language in one moment in time. He argues that to find a science of linguistics it is necessary to
adopt a synchronic approach. Structuralists have taken the synchronic approach to the study of
texts or practices. They argue that in order to really understand a text or practice it is necessary
to focus exclusively on its structural properties. This of course allows critics hostile to structuralism
to criticize it for it is a historical approach to culture.
Structuralism takes two basic ideas from Saussure’s work: first, a concern with the underlying
relations of texts and practices, the ‘grammar’ that makes meaning possible; second, the view
that meaning is always the result of the interplay of relationships of selection and combination
made possible by the underlying structure. In other words, texts and practices are studied as
analogous to language.